gtx 980 vs gtx titan

[max montana]

hello,

in my daily work i face the problem that i struggle with the viewport performance when i work on bigger scenes (about 15-30mill polys).
the configuration of my workstation is (asus gtx 680 4gb, 32gb ram, 3ds max 2013 + vray 2.4)

i think of buying a gtx 980. would this bring a reasonable bettering of the viewport performance or do i have to go higher (gtx titan or titan black)?

thanks in advance

[Neilg]

I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference with viewport speed. slight difference in RT, not enough to make the price difference worth it imo.

[3LP]

Hi

I had the exact same issue with some new workstation we build few weeks ago.
Dual xeon i5-2670 V2 with 128Gb of ram, so not small workstation.

Because people where saying so much good about the gtx cards (and so bad about quadro), I went for few of them on the new workstations.
Tried our old GTX 680, then the GTX 780 Ti, then we bought the Titan, thinking "it's going to change everything".
For a average scene, it's ok and you really don't see "any" difference with GTX cards, true! And I respect that.
But once you hit big scene (like we do and that's why we went for workstation like that) it just doesn't hold up.

Then went with the Quadro K4200, and there, incredible, just blazing fast, actually, we should not have changes workstation at all.
So now we are going with K4200 on all the workstations, even the old ones. It's just not comparable.

I tried to explain this several times in other posts, but ppl seems to just shut me up and tell me quadro are sh*t.
I know, I was like that as well, till I saw how even the latest Titan VS a "cheap old" quadro is performing...
After that, I had a look to few benchs, and it seems the K5000 or K6000 will only bring 5-15% viewport performance gain compared to the K4200.
For us it's definitely not worth it (or at least not in the project we are working on.)
The Quadro is already 10 times faster than the Titan.

Sorry, I'm not a brand-fan but I have to be honest on this one.
Mate, don't even think about going GTX for big scenes and viewport performance.

I guess I will be shut down again, but this is just my 2 cents and I hope this will help you make the right choice, because I saw it and I couldn't believe it myself.

Again, if you want to do RT, go for the GTX980, I'm even thinking of buying 4 of those in the next weeks, no doubt they are way better for rendering than quadro.

Cheers

Stan

[davision]

I walked away from Quadros a long time ago once they stopped created the custom Nitrous drivers. I never saw any advantage to them -- but admittedly I wasn't doing massive poly scenes.

So, Stan (3LP) -- I'm not going to dispute what you say, but what do you think provides the performance difference? Is it simply drivers?

Last i looked, Quadro's had far less raw power than a GTX (cuda cores anyway)... unless you spent $5000 on one, that is.

[3LP]

Yes, Quadro are really less powerful than the GTX, I completely agree, specially the k4200 (who is not that expensive) and to be honest I just have to assume as you are it's all about the drivers.
I wasn't aware technically speaking that they stopped making custom drivers for nitrous, but all in all, it's way faster for really heavy scenes.

[davision]

Not that it matters, but I misspoke -- the special Quadro drivers were called Maxtreme and were unrelated to Nitrous -- probably predated it.

nVidia used to extol the virtues of the drivers saying they were the main reason to buy Quadros... and then after one max update (maybe v2010 - can't remember) they took six months to release the drivers so you had to use the regular nvidia drivers all that time. After that release, I think they stopped with Maxtreme altogether. Maybe because Nitrous was born.

[Neilg]

Around the same time people also figured out how to soft mod the geforces so you could run those drivers on them. some features missing or whatever but I got a 50%+ speed increase installing the maxtreme drivers on an 8800. I think that probably contributed to their shift in focus.

[GLASS-CANVAS]

I can concur with 3LP's findings. They may be slower for RT work, but for viewport performance, the Quadros are light years ahead of GTXs. So I guess it depends what you're after.

(my findings are based on the PCs I make for the office which have contained the complete gamut of graphics cards over the years)

[davision]

Interesting. Do you use After Effects at all? Is there any performance improvement there (with Quadros)? I would think the raw horsepower of the GTX would win in that case.

[GLASS-CANVAS]

We do use all the Adobe image and animation software, but both our editing machines have Quadros, so there's nothing to compare them to. The most time-consuming task in After Effects - rendering out sequences - still appears to be CPU-bound, but at least these days all cores get fully used.

[max montana]

Hi everybody,

sorry for answering late, got a frustrating long flue before christmas hollydays.
Thanks for the substantial feedback to the Quadros Stan. Honestly i never took a look at Quadros anymore since i bought a Dell T5400 workstation in 2008 with a Quadro FX4600 on board. I was dissappointed of the viewport performance when i compared it to the to the gtx 280 i bought the same year.
2 Questions:
Which drivers you use for the K4200?
You have 128GB Ram in the workstation, I only have 32GB Ram. How big is the influence of the Ram on the viewport performance on really big scenes (20 Mill. Polys and more). In the task manager is see that the Ram consumtion goes up to 25GB in heavy scenes.

Thanks!

Max

[Mennovandijk]

I just did some testing om my 2 workstations

Old workstation:
i7 3930 6core (12 threads)
32 GB Ram
GTX Titan 6GB


New workstation:
HP z840
Dual 2680w 10 core = 20 core (=40 threads)
64 GB Ram
Quadro k5200 8GB


Testing the performance between these two card I used 3dsMax 2015 with nitrous driver.

Test rendering Vray RT Cuda:

Created an indoor test and rendered with both machines;
At first frame they seem to render at similar speed. Rendering a second frame the Titan was like 20% faster.
Loading the geometry into memory was faster on the quadro, but once everything was loaded the Titan was faster
hence the faster render time of the 2nd frame.
While rendering the fan of the Titan starts running faster and you are able to hear it getting louder.


View port performance in 3DsMax:

At normal use they perform pretty much identical. If you go into heavy scene territory with
say 80 million polys The rotating, zoom display performance is pretty identical (8fps)

Next, working with a hires model of 600,000 polys:
As long as you don't go into sub-object level, they perform identical. Once you go into vertex soft selection mode and try tweaking the model; the Titan is still faster. (Quadro: 4 fps vs Titan: 8 fps)



When having a scene with lot's of splines, this is where the quadro performs really faster. (Quadro: 22 fps vs titan: 10 fps)

So these are all really unscientific tests, just the regular things what I do in 3DsMax.

The performance in the Adobe CC suite seem identical on both cards.
Doing compositing work in AE, I haven't found anything advantages with the Titan vs Quadro card yet (or vice verse).
Also in Premiere Pro, working with complex edits, R3D files, keying etc seem pretty smooth with both cards,
but this cannot be compared because the HPZ got better CPU's which helps in this regard also.

So these are just my 2 cents, hope it helps anyone making his/her right decision

[Alex_M]

Hi guys,
I am about to by a new graphics card for Vray RT but can't decide between GTX Titan Black and GTX 980. Which will be better for Vray RT and why?

Thanks in advance!

[savage309]

I haven't tested Titan Black, but I believe it should be faster than 980 (because it has more CUDA cores). Also it has more memory (6GB vs 4GB), which is always a good thing.
Btw, have you checked out the Titan X ? It is for sure faster than 980 and Titan Black, and it has 12GB (its price should be close to the other ones (999$), I think).

[Neilg]

Hi guys,
I am about to by a new graphics card for Vray RT but can't decide between GTX Titan Black and GTX 980. Which will be better for Vray RT and why?

Thanks in advance!

Is it urgent?
There's a 980ti on the way that'll be better and cheaper than the titan. probably end of may, around $700, faster than the titan x but with only 6gb. these are all rumors but they seem accurate.